AMELIA'S VOICE
BYLUCRETIAVOIGT INDEPENDENTARTSWRITER
Michael Hite is not now nor has he ever been a woman. He didn't choose a woman's voice to narrate his first novel "The Last Boat." Amelia, the main character, chose him.

"Amelia is such a strong character. I guess I never thought about it," he recently said when asked about the decision to write from a female point of view. "To be honest, this character kind of showed up in my head and had to get out. Once it started coming out, it just flowed."

Like the water under the steamship ferry that provides the tableau on which Amelia's story begins, Hite's prose flows through time, taking the reader from the early 1900s in Nantucket, through the battlefields of World War I France, and up to modern Nantucket. The common thread throughout is Amelia Moorland, a centenarian on the day of that momentous birthday.

Hite is not only comfortable in the company of strong women, but gravitates to them. "To be honest, I find women fascinating," he said, a note of reverence in his voice. "I think that women have so many layers and I've had some very larger than life female characters in my personal life."

Hite has been a frequent visitor to Nantucket for the past 20 years but even as a child he heard the siren song of Nantucket calling to him. "As a child my family visited Cape Cod. I wanted to come over to Nantucket, but we just didn't have enough time," he reminisced. "So I wanted my parents to stop the car on the shore so I could at least get out and see it. But we didn't stop, and of course I now know I wouldn't have been able to see anything anyway!"

Hite and his wife Diane purchased a house on Nantucket in the '90s after having fallen in love with the island during their first visit. They set out to renovate their home, and stayed with their friend Linda Loring when they came up on the weekends to check on the progress. "At the end of the day we'd sit around the fire and [Loring] would talk about Old Nantucket and the characters she used to run into. It just struck me that here's this island that draws these strong unique characters, and I wanted to create one."

Hite's inspiration was bubbling under the surface, waiting for a subject. "I love history to begin with, and researching," he explained. "I enjoy it because you tend to stumble upon things that can enhance the work even more so. It took a lot of time because I basically read the [Nantucket newspapers] from 1900 to 1927, every single issue. It was just a great resource for the issues of the time, as well as island attitudes about some things that were going on outside the island, World War I, the invention of the automobile. I enjoyed the research, it's one of those things I could easily get lost in. The good news is I at least had a novel to keep me disciplined!"

That adherence to detailed research is evident in the novel beginning with the cover photo. The cover photo, "Woman with dory on beach, Cod Fish Park, 'Sconset," is used courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association. As you read Amelia's story, however, you come to believe that it is her picture and it has finally found its resting place. When Hite stumbled upon the photo at the NHA, he knew it was a companion to the novel he was writing. When it came time to publish his book, however, the publisher did not fully appreciate the connection. "Working with the publisher, I really had to fight hard for this design, because they actually just mangled this photo," he recounted regarding the cover design. "Their design of the cover was a picture frame around her shoulders and her head and they got rid of everything else. I said 'What is this? I can't sell a book like this!'" Hite was fortunate to be working with iUniverse, a company that assists authors in connection with upscale self-publishing. "With traditional publishers, writers don't really have much say in the covers of their books," he explained.

A graduate of Columbia University's MFA program in screenwriting and directing, Hite's background is evident in the dialogue and the picturesque descriptions of "The Last Boat." "Screenwriting is visual, as well as possessing the economy of dialogue and the economy of words all together," he explained. "It really informed to a certain degree the pace of the novel, but I will have to say that in various drafts of the novel people in the book industry would say 'You need to slow this part down.' In a novel you have more time to develop the scenery. Writing for the screen kind of helped me trim some of the dead weight to make sure the story kept moving at a nice pace. In terms of pace, in terms of description, and in terms of dialogue, that background really helped in the writing of the novel."

Through it all, however, is Amelia's voice, strong and mesmerizing, pulling you under the surface of her story, much like the Nantucket Sound. Through Hite she found her voice, and her

story could now be told. I

Hite will discuss his novel "The Last Boat" at the Nantucket Atheneum Great Hall, 1 India Street, this Sunday, Nov. 25, 2 p.m. to 3:15 p.m.